On Crowdfunding Science II

Disclaimer: I run an organization that has attempted science crowdfunding (and failed) and intends to relaunch using crowdfunding later this year, and I have personally contributed a small sum ($25) to the Immunity Project

In my personal life, I find myself to be a repeated advocate against using science as a system of authority, and it bugs me to no end when scientists present themselves as unassailable authorities. It is not clear to me that the structure of scientific advancement, as compared, to say, Feynman’s era, responsibly identifies talent and promotes them to positions of authority in the hierarchy. In our contemporary science era, I would argue that even more than before, advancements require belief in the ignorance of experts.

Several quotes from the article, in my mind, betray the dangerous trend to authority in science, and illustrate the sandbagging of the process by individuals who have a vested interest in protecting the dominant funding structure from criticism.

The concept they’re selling is an old concept that has been shown not to work, and can’t work.

No, it’s an iteration of an old concept for which some attempts have been shown not to work. Part of the problem with science these days is that there is an endemic “bigger is better” or “new toys” dogma. In reality, we don’t know that much about the immune system, and there’s not a compelling, monolithic, fundamental reason why this shouldn’t work (unlike, say, warp drive, which gets taxpayer money). The Immunity Project is iterating on previous ideas and attempts at HIV vaccines with relatively incremental advances in technology. Criticism leveled at the Immunity Project suffers from a bias, caused by repeated clinical failures, that a “revolutionary” idea is necssary to solve the problem, versus an “evolutionary” idea. Ultimately, because of the low-n on vaccine clinical meta-data pools, it’s impossible to make an unbiased judgement about the likelihood of success of any untried venture, be it incremental or novel.

They’re preying on people who are desperate for a vaccine…

They point out that the project’s website does not mention its minuscule chance of success (most vaccine candidates fail)

The first quote seemed like a shot in the dark: Desperation is generally less associated with vaccines and more associated with cures. The donor base is likely to be from among the high-tech crowd, and the groups most benefitted by a vaccine for HIV are in sub-saharan Africa and southeast Asia. I suppose one could argue that they are preying on people desperate for an altruistic outlet, but by the very nature of crowdfunding (I gave $25) the sums are small, and so the effort is distributing the risk and cost of failure effectively. The bottom line is, $400,000 is not very much money and most donors are aware that this is a high-risk, high-reward venture. It certainly seems to be a better use of $400,000 than a glowing plant. The second quote is a vacuous criticism: by virtue of the fact that there is no HIV vaccine yet, there is a “miniscule chance of success”. I’d not be worried about the ethics of donors being misinformed about the likelihood of success. Together I think these quotes show a strong vein of authoritarian paternalism in those interviewed by the article’s author. To me, this goes against the spirit of science.

I worry that the skills necessary to run a successful crowd-funding campaign are orthogonal to the skills needed to make a successful therapy.

Researchers indeed seem uncomfortable about whether materials designed to inspire and engage the public can accurately convey the state of the Immunity Project’s science.

These are the most telling quotes of them all. I, personally, worry that the skills necessary to get NIH funding, or SBIR grants to launch for-profit biotech startups, are orthogonal to the skills needed to make a successful therapy. I know for sure that powerpoint presentations at conferences and RO1 applications generally fail to accurately convey the state of any given project (there’s a word for that – grantsmanship). Federally funded science of late is littered with projects that oversell their achievements to the public, as well, like Arsenic Life, or the National Ignition Facility’s kilojoule yield from a machine that consumes megajoules of energy, misleadingly released in the press as breakeven or power gain.

Bottom line: There are thousands of professors receiving NIH dollars, justifying their work as having (often very remote) biomedical applications, and a very small percentage of them have a drug to their name. At least by appealing directly to the crowdfunding donor class, the Immunity Project is getting dollars on a voluntary basis, instead of from a culture where the taxpayer subsidizes scientists to be overselling their work to authorized reviewers from a closed circle of anointed professors who are themselves a product of the same system that rewards skills orthogonal to make a successful therapy.